This blog is continued at my cycling blog- Bisikletci

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FirstBIKE is an unbreakable kid's bike!

Bursa from a distance

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Ararim seni her yerde!

Weebike.com: FIVE REASONS WHY TRAINING WHEELS ARE BAD

Weebike.com: FIVE REASONS WHY TRAINING WHEELS ARE BAD

How do my spokes bend like that?

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Feel good radio trash

What's on the radio worth listening to? Nothing much. I'm usually tuned in to NPR but I'll cruise the dial occasionally and maybe accidentally find something new. I can't help noticing that lately, the big girls of pop want to be your anti-depressant. To wit: Katy Perry's awful song about being "fireworks".. um.. it BLOWS. Have you seen the video of little teenage pukes with "fireworks in their belly"? One can't help but think about the movie Aliens during this terrible clip. Lady Gaga's piece of shit song about being "born this wa-hay".. Oh yeah thanks Lady Gaga for reminding me I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me, no matter what back water 3rd world crevice of the earth I used to populate. Lady, were you born a fucking complete and total sell-out? Last and not least pitiful is PINK with her "Prety pretty please!?.. blah blah you are perfect, you are never less than perfect!!" This one has the most insincerity ringing in it. I bet the music sheet has dollar signs thrown in for good measure. "Pretty pretty please?" Umm okay, as long as you put it that way.. begging me not to be a self hating piece of shit, I guess I can at least try not to be a pathetic loser. What else out there sucks? There are other bombs which the teenie bopper generation keeps feeding their parents cash into, making it impossible to escape. Cars don't need radios. All they need is an ipod port and a power/volume dial wired into some good speakers. Am I right?

Post number 1206

Has anyone seen Metin or his Talk Turkey blog? Where is Phanja? Burcu? Superhero? Remember Turkish Torque? There were others.. I used to do a periodic Hitchhiker's Guide to all the Turkish blogs.. Those were fun times I think. Deborah? Drop some old names if you know where to find them.

Taking stock at 40

Not much has changed since I completed my 40th year, um.. yesterday, but what invades my thoughts more than anything is the very small number of friends I've collected. Those who know me will tell you that I have more friends than I know what to do with. I guess it's all relative. Define "friend" for me and I'll bet that my definition holds people to a higher standard of behavior and participation than yours does. I really wish I weren't this jaded on the subject of friendship, because it gets in the way. It's got something to do with childhood problems.. and no I am not about to announce that I was molested as a kid- that never happened to me- but what did happen was that we had an alcoholic in the house. Being the oldest of three, it fell upon me to be the super-responsible 12 year old.. and from there it spiraled out of control. You can't be a kid in an environment where fists are flying, glass is shattering, 911 is being dialed or you're running out the door to escape on a regular basis. When I was 17 my mother was nearly choked to death- if I did not run to her aid in that moment she would have been gone. So it's told that [adult] children of alcoholics have a hard time with a lot of things. We're crippled, we're lame, and we can't understand why. I think we have a strong tendency to shut down and build protective barriers- sometimes very subtle, sometimes very conspicuous- but they're always there- reminding others to keep their distance in order to instinctively keep ourselves out of harm's way. It's a survival tool that kept us alive long ago, but which now burdens us with it's obsolescence and brutality. Time to put down this weapon and be vulnerable? It's not for lack of trying, but it seems like whenever we let our guard down someone takes a cheap shot, someone exploits weakness, someone betrays you.. and then we say "well fuck everyone!- I don't need a single one of them".. Then the next thing you know it's your birthday and you're left wondering how you managed to isolate yourself and why you count the people who you trust on only one hand. Oh yeah, I remember now.. raging violent alcoholic in the house conditioned us to be in perpetual warrior-survivor mode. You can't get an closer to me than the length of my fucking spear. Sorry about that- it's a work-in-progress.

T-minus 3 minutes

and I'm officially 40 years old.

Murat Altinbasak: NOT ON FACEBOOK

BEWARE: I do NOT have a Facebook account. The one which exists and shows a picture of me on a race bike is controlled by a hack and a thief who has threatened to harm me and my family physically- AVOID!
Facebook has been notified but as we can see, two months later and they have done nothing to protect me or any of the 300+ people linked to my old account. They don't care about you or me, please face this fact. You are a bunch of whiny ones and zeroes to them who pay $0 for their "service", so don't expect a lot of help from them if/when you ever need them. Printing their own money using this cash cow is priority 1 through 1000 for Facebook.

Have you ever?..

.Awoken from a dream in which no one likes you, no one wants to talk to you or know you or be seen with you, and everyone turns their back on you and wishes you would go away or die? Hopefully not, but if it happens, go back to sleep and end your rest with a better dream. You don't want that negative shit haunting you all day. It's T-minus 4 days until 40 and it feels like someone is holding my head under-water. I don't think I'm allowed to come up for air until I blow out the fucking candles. It was just yesterday that I was in the 1st grade, gazing up at the gigantic 6th graders and wondering how awesome it was to be big.
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Do NOT wish me a happy birthday..

..on Facebook. I no longer have an account there. My account was hacked by some piece of shit thug overseas.. and if you engage them, they will pretend to be me and they have the skill and technique to hack you too. There are Hacking forums loaded with the simple instructions of how to do it. Mostly a bunch of pimply teenagers I suppose- they talk about how cool and easy it is to steal someone's account "just to fuck with them". So please do yourself a favor and leave birthday wishes here, if you're so inclined.. My 40th is on March 19th, same as Bruce Willis and Spike Lee.. Then again, traffic to my blogs is kind of light lately so I'm not getting my hopes up. More than anything, I wish that people would take enough of an interest to pick up the fucking phone and call eachother. Fuck blogs and facebook and email and texting. No one talks on the phone anymore, and you can forget about getting together in person. Everyone is engorged with being popular and getting LIKEd on Facebook instead of "being" liked as a real person. Getting LIKEd is something people do TO you, sort of like getting punched or kissed. Being liked is what I would prefer to be, wouldn't you? It's pathetic how we've let technology erase our social skills and replace them with "social networking". Now that I'm out of FB it's painfully evident how many true friends are out there, and it isn't many.. it's few.. but a few good friends is all you need. Having a mutual friend with a total stranger has been sold to us as a good-enough reason to become friends with total strangers who, at the end of the day, don't give a squirt of piss about you. Stop buying that tripe and call your friends once a week instead of peeping tom on them every fucking minute of the day and masquerading it as friendship.
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No more Facebook

The only profile of mine which exists on Facebook from now on, is the old account which some low-life thug in Turkey hacked from me. You are discouraged from engaging them or sending them money if they pose as me stranded in an airport somewhere. English speakers have no worries because said hacker doesn't speak English- only very profane Turkish..
Goodbye Facebook. You fucking suck.
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A word about dogs and cats

I am an animal lover. Maybe not to the extent of a pet owner, but I can't resist the affection and cuddliness of a dog or cat which approaches me in a friendly way. Where I draw the line is all of the charities and rights groups which exist solely for the protection of these animals. Here's a revelation: there are people throughout the world in need of food and shelter, and until they are taken care of, no animal charity will receive dollar one from me. Saving animals from euthanasia is ridiculous. Look- there just too many domesticated pets for people to successfully take care of. Every dollar offered to an animal charity could go to a human charity instead, and SHOULD! Last I checked, euthanasia is not an option for humans in need. It's a humane option for animals, so DO IT!! Send your money to the charities which help keep humans sheltered, healthy and fed please..
Don't even get me started on pet food- the million fucking dollars spent on a TV ad for Fancy Feast could pay for the sustenance that a town of 10,000 people requires, for a long time.
More to come on this subject.
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Fatherhood.

Fatherhood shapes lifetimes of behavior, habits and values. It never ends. Years after losing him, I'm in the unfortunate yet grateful position of realizing this, that he lives in me, and I carry immense guilt because my younger siblings were cheated- I had him all to myself..
Please pardon the sentimental rantings of this textbook Pisces..
Thanks for reading.
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